Hi, I'm planning to move a bunch of my cables between my onboard SATA ports and my 2 SATA cards from the drives in my array (for better cable management).  I assume that if I mark the exact position of each drive (in particular the parity drive) in my array and restore them to the correct positions, this will not be an issue?

 

I thought this was in the wiki somewhere but I've been unable to find it.

 

Thanks in advance.

That's exactly what you need to do. If possible grab a screen shot of your disk layout in the control panel and honestly stick a sticky or whatever you can on each drive to make sure it goes back in that assigned position. As you know its not what cables go into which slots its making sure your drive is assigned the correct slot in the web interface.

So the actually device (/dev/sda , /dev/hdb, etc) or physical SATA/PATA slot does not matter? Only the exact drive in the same Unraid "disk" slot?

 

I am about to venture on the same path.

 

 

So the actually device (/dev/sda , /dev/hdb, etc) or physical SATA/PATA slot does not matter? Only the exact drive in the same Unraid "disk" slot?

 

I am about to venture on the same path.

 

 

correct

That's exactly what you need to do. If possible grab a screen shot of your disk layout in the control panel and honestly stick a sticky or whatever you can on each drive to make sure it goes back in that assigned position. As you know its not what cables go into which slots its making sure your drive is assigned the correct slot in the web interface.

Cool, thanks.

 

I actually use a label maker to put the serials on the back of the drive so I can see them when I have the case off. This makes it a lot easier when I'm trying to find a particular physical drive and match it to my array.

That is exactly what I did. I put the slot number on each drive starting from the bottom and as I added disks I stacked the next disk on top increased its number. I started with "P" on the bottom for pairty. Also I included the last 6 numbers of the drives serial number so I can quickly match it with the web interface just encase the little position number falls off.   At the time of this photo the unlabeled was my cache drive, but it also had a blue cable to remind me as well as the bottom red for parity.